Sharing your master's thesis

Image: Linus Nylund, Unsplash

You finished your thesis! Congrats!! Please make sure you've celebrated and slept well since you finished-- you deserve it.

Then, keep reading! 

Are you back? Good, because if you want the world to benefit from all your hard work and new discoveries from the last six months of blood, sweat, and tears, you're not done! 

The people who can benefit from what you found need to hear about it in a way that answers their questions or solves their problems. (Hint: that format is very, very rarely a 12,000 word master's thesis.) 

At a bare minimum, you should email a copy of your final thesis to everyone who helped you in your research, including research participants, and thank them. Do this now, before you leave for summer. 

To increase the chances that people can benefit from your work: 

• Identify and build relationships with the people who can use and benefit from your findings. (Ideally you do this at the start of the research, but better late than never.) See Mark Reed's advice for stakeholder analysis. Your stakeholders might be on social media, in your neighbourhood, researchers you cited, politicians, civil servants, NGOs, business leaders... 
• Condense your findings down to a few key takeaways, supported in both images (graphs, photographs, tables, etc.) and words. The slides you made to present your thesis (following my advice) are a good place to start! You can also practice summarising what you found with The Message Box from COMPASS.  

Communicate your work in ways that are easy to access and understand. Some inspiration from past LUMES master's theses: 

• Present to your participants and stakeholders. This can be an online webinar, like Paula Kuss gave to Lund Municipality employees about her thesis on reducing city car use, or at a workshop or conference in person. Consider accompanying the presentation with a 1-2 page Executive Summary of the main takeaways with advice for how to put your findings in practice. (The best way to get someone specific to read your work is to make an appointment with them to present and discuss your findings.) 
• Write an op-ed (debattartikel in Swedish) for a local newspaper in your study region. Newspapers are interested in results (news!) that relates to their readers. Read the submission guidelines, then email the editor of the page with a short pitch (description of your study and key findings) and ask if they're interested to publish a contribution. Halley Rainer wrote about municipalities in Skåne reducing food waste for Sydsvenskan.
• Develop teaching materials to use your findings in the classroom, like Seth Wynes did for high school students on the climate benefits of going car, flight, and meat-free.  
• Write a blog post (on your own website, a site like Medium, for a newsletter like Substack, or for a research project or conference) with your findings. Klara Winkler translated her blog post on vineyard landscape values into five languages! 
• Post your thesis findings on social media!
  • Twitter thread by Agnes Kreil highlighting her PhD thesis on reducing academic flying. She has a great balance of text + images, and she conveys the key findings upfront, with links to more details. 
  • I'm pretty new to Instagram so I'm still learning, but here's the first Story I made about a study with Sara Ullström about flying less. 
  • I really like the way journalist Whitney Bauck shares her work on Instagram, like this Story on circularity. 
  • Take 1% of the creativity you use on lumeMEs and apply it to sharing your thesis :) 
  • If you have a YouTube channel, post a video of your thesis there! It could be a presentation, or a more informal chat talking to camera about what you did and what you found. 
  • You could always do an Instagram Live video chatting about your thesis with a friend! 
  • I don't know how to TikTok but if you do, share your work there, especially if you want to reach people under 30. 
• Infographics and art 
  • If you like to use art, check out Emma Li Johansson's work for inspiration on communicating research with infographics, video abstracts, and art.  
• Podcasts 
  • If there's a podcast you listen to and think your work could be of interest, you can always send the producer a pitch to include your work. Consider starting with university-based podcasts that focus on research, like IIIEE's Advancing Sustainable Solutions. 

You might also be interested in turning your master's thesis into a peer-reviewed academic publication, or presenting it at a scientific conference. If this is the case, talk to your supervisor for advice, and to ask if they are interested to mentor you in publishing (and being a co-author if appropriate). See my advice on academic publishing. But academic publishing can take years-- make sure you share the findings you have now with those who can benefit from them! 

Good luck and thank you for asking and answering research questions, the world needs what you found!